Nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, destroying a large portion of the city and trashing more than half of its 370 buses, the city is getting some public transportation fueled by biodiesel.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that the eight new biodiesel buses arrive just as skyrocketing gas prices are helping increase ridership:
The vehicles were built by the Orion bus company based in Ontario, Canada. At 35 feet long, the bus is smaller than the standard RTA coach.
Currently, 29 of the buses are in the New Orleans area, with 10 more arriving from New York in the next few months.
The release of the brand-new buses comes at a time of increased reliance on the RTA. From April and May of 2007 to April and May of this year, ridership has increased 53 percent, RTA spokeswoman Rosalind Cook said.
Many of the new riders have been using public transportation in light of rising gas prices, Cook said.
These new buses are more comfortable than the older buses and have better access for riders with disabilities. Plus, of course, they run on cleaner-burning, renewable biodiesel.
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has signed into law measures that will provide incentives to biodiesel producers while mandating a rising scale of biodiesel percentages in all diesel sold in the state.
A committee of scientists that helps the government make decisions is recommending that the U.S. keeps working on biodiesel.
Originally created to replace over 100 separate newsletters POET distributed every year, Vital is putting a face to the ethanol industry. Throughout 2008, Vital will base its editorial on four main themes: the future of ethanol, community profiles, industry information and environmental advancements. 
Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary Steven Chalk told the Senate Environment and Public Works clean air subcommittee that keeping the current RFS policy in place is “critical to ensuring growth in all parts of the biofuels supply chain, from feedstocks, to biorefineries, to infrastructure, including pipelines.”
DuPont vice president for technology John Pierce told the committee that the expanded RFS is an attainable goal, both in terms of corn ethanol and cellulosic. “In fact, there are multiple technology developers intending to produce cellulosic ethanol in pilot or demonstration quantities from a range of feedstocks over the next 24 months. The economics and carbon performance of grain ethanol continues to improve as well, as does agricultural productivity and sustainability in the US. These trends suggest that while the RFS targets are aggressive, as they should be, they are not out of reach.”
To help those small steps grow into sustainable replacements for our dependence on petroleum, 
Scientists with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are using nearly 10 years of satellite information to figure out where is the best place on the oceans to put up wind energy turbines.
QuikSCAT, launched in 1999, continuously tracks the speed, direction and power of winds near the ocean surface to predict storms and enhance weather forecast accuracy.
The Center of Excellence for Hazardous Materials Management recently harvested commercial-scale quantities of algae from its test salt water ponds located at New Mexico State University Agriculture Science Center in north Eddy County, according to Wren Prather-Stroud, spokeswoman for the nonprofit organization based in Carlsbad.